Divine Doodling

A firm hand pressed down on my shoulder as my pencil made an upward sweeping motion creating a near-symmetric circle as its final mark in my notebook. "Doesn't look like math to me," my teacher said as I raised to meet her eyes. "It looks like doodling!" she said. Wisdom prevailed, and I didn't say what I was thinking. In my mind, the lines and shapes did, in fact, involve a little geometry. Not that it was on purpose! 

Doodling, by definition, is an aimless or casual scribble. "Doodling gives you a new form of mindfulness which allows your spirit to rest, recover and regroup," says Carol Edmonston in her book "The Healing Power of Doodling." 

I know from personal experience, that you can talk, listen, think about things, or think about nothing. All while you doodle! The listening part can be incredibly meaningful. What if we worked as hard to listen as we do to have something to say? More specifically, what if we turned our passive scribbling into an active space to hear God's creative and directive voice? 

We often want God in our life for some "thing." What He's most interested in is some "body."

He wants a human relationship—somebody to listen and hear what He says. Most of us have predetermined where we want the lines, dots, and circles. We have filled page after page with ideal places where we want the shapes of our life to intersect, leaving a tiny margin for the voice of God and His formation. 

We must remember God started His work in our frame of reference with a blank slate. Everything was "Without form and void," to be exact. He still works best in us humans when we give Him back some of the space that was His, to begin with. God's voice and what it said was the element that gave the void its value. Listen again to what He said, "Let there be…" (Genesis 1:3). 

When we doodle, even if not literally but in some way give God some time and space in our life, we allow the "let there be" to be spoken.

In the Divine "letting," the art of God is expressed, and a human being's potential is discovered.

There is no limit to what He can do when we are patient, wait, and "let there be."   

Psalm 130:5 –

"I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in his word I hope."